Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Blue State, Chicago-based artist Alice Tippit’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Encompassing painting, works on paper, and installation, Blue State draws from Tippit’s ongoing engagement with the relationship between image and language.
Tippit’s paintings function much like knots—entangled forms and ideas that encourage tours down multiple, often contradictory, paths of interpretation. One might trace a relationship between two depicted elements, rearrange them, pass one through the meaning of the other, flip them inside out, upside down, or attempt to pull them apart completely. Every expression or form, while often simple and familiar, seems to point beyond itself toward something less defined, less fixed. The process is recursive—rather than seeking to resolve uncertainty, Tippit’s work embraces it as a generative condition. Arriving at a single definitive conclusion is not the goal, instead meaning becomes an active process of searching, manipulating, questioning, and returning.
Joining her paintings are a suite of works on paper, rendered in graphite and colored pencil. These works feature pairs of homographs, words that share the same spelling while having multiple, often highly divergent meanings. As image, a phrase such as “just lie” or “might subject” achieves a simultaneity of meaning difficult to achieve when enmeshed in a purely literary context. It is possible, of course, to feel dispirited and live in a part of our country where your values are reflected by a majority of your fellow citizens. How often do we entertain the extent to which these two states are inextricably tied to one another? Carefully selected and arranged, these phrases introduce layers of choice that elevate language to the imaginative level. While Tippit’s paintings posit whether image, when situated in just the right space between clarity and obscurity, can do more for us than language; her works on paper ask what becomes possible when the two work together, each complicating and expanding the meaning of the other.
Tippit’s paintings function much like knots—entangled forms and ideas that encourage tours down multiple, often contradictory, paths of interpretation. One might trace a relationship between two depicted elements, rearrange them, pass one through the meaning of the other, flip them inside out, upside down, or attempt to pull them apart completely. Every expression or form, while often simple and familiar, seems to point beyond itself toward something less defined, less fixed. The process is recursive—rather than seeking to resolve uncertainty, Tippit’s work embraces it as a generative condition. Arriving at a single definitive conclusion is not the goal, instead meaning becomes an active process of searching, manipulating, questioning, and returning.
Joining her paintings are a suite of works on paper, rendered in graphite and colored pencil. These works feature pairs of homographs, words that share the same spelling while having multiple, often highly divergent meanings. As image, a phrase such as “just lie” or “might subject” achieves a simultaneity of meaning difficult to achieve when enmeshed in a purely literary context. It is possible, of course, to feel dispirited and live in a part of our country where your values are reflected by a majority of your fellow citizens. How often do we entertain the extent to which these two states are inextricably tied to one another? Carefully selected and arranged, these phrases introduce layers of choice that elevate language to the imaginative level. While Tippit’s paintings posit whether image, when situated in just the right space between clarity and obscurity, can do more for us than language; her works on paper ask what becomes possible when the two work together, each complicating and expanding the meaning of the other.